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Saturday, October 19, 2013

Dove Stew, Anyone?

Gunshots
continue through the day. Each one is unexpected and causes me to start.

There
is also the worry of being accidentally popped in the head – or some other
precious body part -- through the totally open architecture of my house.

Plenty of open architecture to
invite the errant bullet

I have
no idea of the distance buckshot carries, so I queried Yahoo Answers to find out. Somebody
who calls himself “Mitch 321” posted a response.

“There is actually a simple formula to
work out the maximum range of shotgun pellets by using the pellet size.The smaller the pellet the less
distance it will travel since as spheres get smaller their ballistic
coefficient reduces.”

With
all the firing going on, you’d think the guys out there were hunting Bengal
Tigers or something.

No!

Fist-sized mourning doves!

You
know – wee birds, coo-coo-coo, mate for life.

Yee-umm!

Viequenses
pick the buckshot out of the dove meat and make stew or fry it. All this hullabaloo
about rising before dawn, tramping around the dewy wilds with shotguns at the
ready -- when all you have to do is buy all the Dinty Moore stew you can carry
from the Morales supermarket.

The main threat to doves as a species
is intense hunting.

Their diet consists almost
entirely of seeds that they pluck from open ground. They usually forage
in pairs or small groups – ideal targets for hunters.

Dove species range across
Canada, Central America and the Caribbean. In North America alone, they are the
most popular game bird. More than 20 million are taken by hunters each year, exceeding
the annual kill of all other migratory game birds combined.

Birds that escape the gunfire often
consume fallen shotgun pellets as they forage on the ground -- and die from lead
poisoning.

As a result, they have an average
life span of a year or so.

Everybody knows that doves mate
for life. But if your life might be as brief as a year, you have to make the
most of it, I guess.

And doves do.

They have an enviable and
fecund sex life. Their love-making yields as many as six broods in a season.

And young mourning doves mature
early, getting into the sex thing the same year they’re hatched.

All of which again
demonstrating that for both human and dove species, the Paradise that is Vieques
offers both agony and ecstasy.